The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) has embarked on an initiative to equip all higher secondary teachers to prepare questions that not only test students’ knowledge and understanding but their creativity and ability to apply concepts practically as well.
Usually, only a certain group of teachers prepares the questions centrally. Now, the attempt is to involve all 28,000-odd higher secondary teachers and prepare a question pool, with particular focus on continuous and comprehensive evaluation, for next year. An initial cluster training for teachers was conducted by the SCERT, Directorate of General Education, and Samagra Shiksha, Kerala, recently as part of the curriculum reforms.
At the cluster meeting, teachers were familiarised with a set of such questions in each subject that were introduced at a State Resource Group meeting earlier. The teachers then prepared fresh questions on its basis. After online discussions in the presence of district resource group members, the questions will be fine-tuned, and at least one question will be contributed by a teacher. These will then be vetted by subject experts, and uploaded to an online portal. A deadline of December 22 has been set for this. The questions on the portal will be made available to students too.
Classroom transactions
SCERT officials say question papers tend to have the same questions with rarely anything new. The question pool will encourage a change in thinking and the way classroom transactions happen. It will help move students away from rote learning, and make the examination process more effective, both continuous and year-end evaluations.
The SCERT also aims at creating an online question generation system so that questions prepared by the teachers covering all units and all cognitive domains are uploaded onto a software, and a question paper with specific number of questions can be generated by the system. This will allow the authorities at district or even school level to conduct term examinations if they have access to the system, thus supporting decentralisation and evaluation of a student before the year-end assessment. However, teachers need to be trained to prepare questions that are not just knowledge-based but application-based too, say the officials. The ultimate goal is to benefit the students, they point out.
